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The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

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Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#151

Post by RobertoG »

LaundroMat wrote: post #143
RobertoG wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great insight about Lynch. I was totally puzzled by Mulholland Drive, then I read an explanation in a IMDB review, watch it again, and I was amazed that everything made sense. It was encrypted and somebody gave me the keys. That's really an artistic experience.

Do you still have that link somewhere?

Sorry, I can't find the one I read, but there are several good "explanations" in the IMDB review section. Actually, the story is pretty straightforward. I suppose that if you are a Lynch scholar already, the effect is not so great. The magic for me happened when I didn't get it in the first view and everything made sense in the second.

One big thing, that I realized later (and the GP comments on this too) is that Lynch has his owns symbols and language that clue the audience about what's going on (the red velvet curtain for the subconscious/dream world, for instance). If you are not aware of that, it's easy to get lost.

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#152

Post by gfxgirl »

at_a_remove wrote: post #41

Take Dark City . I believe the studio forced a new opening that more or less explained everything rather than letting you puzzle it all out. I didn't find the movie too hard to work through, but I think Hollywood execs have a fairly low estimation of the audience's intellect. Lynch is a bit harder. Lynch is atypical in two ways that play off of one another. First and most obviously, he has been developing as a film-m…

I must have been lucky. I saw Dark City opening week and there was no explainer. I bought the DVD as soon as it came out, no explainer there either. I bought the Bluray later, no explainer there.

On the other hand I did see Blade Runner when it had the narration the first time I saw it. Luckily I've seen it without many times since.

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#153

Post by rwmj »

mikhailfranco wrote: post #146

I highly recommend the BBC radio versions of Chandler's Marlowe books, starring Ed Bishop as Marlowe. The collection contains 6 x 1.5hr plays, including The Big Sleep. https://play.google.com/store/audiobooks/details/Raymond_Cha... The plays are rarely rebroadcast on the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007k360

Ed Bishop out of UFO? (Checks Wikipedia, and yes it is!)

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#154

Post by telside »

leephillips wrote: post #7
Causality1 wrote: post #3

arguing that we should embrace ambiguity. This is probably my most despised media trend of the 21st century, and that's saying something. "You decide how it ended" "You decide if she lived or died" "Their motivations for doing that are up to you" "It means whatever you want it to mean" It's an excuse for lazy writing and for being too cowardly to make decisions.

Ambiguity, the planting of multiple possible interpretations, has been a part of art forever. All art: literature, painting, etc. I would even say it’s an integral part of the best art.

I was so into art film in college because of the cheap weird art film video store down the street.

Having digested so much and having 30 years to think about, I just don't think the medium lends itself to art well. The medium lends itself to cohesive pedestrian narratives. Going beyond that mostly just ends up with bad art and nonsense.

Big Sleep has nothing on Warhol's Sleep. I mean I actually rented Warhol's Sleep before...

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#155

Post by skinnymuch »

asdff wrote: post #68
WalterBright wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having an "explanation" that it's all pointless magic is not an explanation. I suspect that the writers originally had a coherent story arc, but the show was so successful they had to extend, extend, extend it, which produced the incoherence.

Well, it is one of the most highly regarded series in history by critics, so some people thought the explanations were sufficient at least. Abrams and the writers were planning from the outset to do that many seasons and wrote a story bible outlining all the lore and mythology referenced throughout the writing. Having story arcs over the course of years was intentional and a novel idea at the time when most TV series…

Where do you get Lost being one of the most highly regarded series in history by critics? Besides that not being the case even if you only look at Metacritic and Rotten and only look at the basic numbers, a review from Entertainment Weekly, TV Guide, or E! are always on those sites but not worth much at all.

For the two core creators, they both have other shows that are arguably more highly regarded. Lindelof’s The Leftover’s and depending on how you feel comparing it to a mini series, The Watchmen. For JJ Abrahams, Fringe’s last 3 seasons or each season building upon the previous season are very highly regarded.

The big difference between Lost and The Leftovers and especially Fringe are that the latter two were underwatched and less hyped than Lost. Not that Lost is more highly regarded critically. It’s more highly regarded by an avg person, but that’s just pop culture fame.

The hype and credit you’re giving to Lost for outlining and having lore from the outset is over done as well. It is doubtful chat Lost stuck to much more than a loose outline by the end of the series. It felt much more like its contemporary Battlestar Galactics where it had its lore and story down early on, but lost that for various reasons after the early seasons.

On the other hand, there were shows back then too that had their lore and content planned out in advance. HBO’s Carnivale is one contemporary example coming out a year earlier that had its lore written out in detail as well.

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#156

Post by ubermonkey »

lmm wrote: post #133
ubermonkey wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a deeply predictable (and pedestrian) take, and I 100% expected to see it here (as I expect to see it in any technical forum). Highly technical people -- developers, engineers, etc -- are much more likely (at least in my experience) to react negatively to nonlinear storytelling. Further, the reaction is almost never "wow, not for me" but instead "THIS IS STUPID". It's essentially the equivalent of walking thr…

> Years ago, I saw a play by Maria Irene Fornes called THE DANUBE. It's a bizarre, baffling, and beautiful piece, and you cannot really approach it like you would (say) a Marvel film expecting a traditional narrative. That's not what it's FOR. It's an experience. You have to let go of the desire to tick off plot points and characters like players in a football program and just experience the art on its own terms. > E…

>Has anyone actually done a double-blind trial comparing "good" and "bad" high-ambiguity works?

Peak HN comment right here.

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#157

Post by leephillips »

dang wrote: post #142
leephillips wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may not be a counterexample, because they are probably classified as modern, but people carry on disputes about the basic elements of the plots of Nabokov’s novels. There is no general agreement about the actual plot of Transparent Things , and a lot of argument over what really happened in Lolita . In many of his works, such as Pale Fire and Bend Sinister , you have to think a lot just to apprehend what the plo…

Nabokov was most certainly modern and veering into postmodern at the end. I was totally thinking about The Prisoner as an example when this came up today! It's clear that McGoohan had gotten bored with neatly constructed thrillers, and wanted to create an allegory and explore deeper themes. The great thing about that show is that every individual episode was a neatly constructed thriller in its own right, even though…

That was fun.

EDIT: Although, for those who haven’t seen the show, the video contains a massive spoiler.

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#158

Post by Firadeoclus »

yupper32 wrote: post #48
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're using devices to make a story more difficult to follow, just for the sake of making it more difficult to follow for the "challenge", then that's stupid. I don't know you, and even I know you disagree with your own statement. If not, the only thing you'd enjoy are media targeted at pre-schoolers and young children. Anything targeting and age beyond that is made more difficult to follow, by design to make i…

> If not, the only thing you'd enjoy are media targeted at pre-schoolers and young children. Oh come on, you know I wasn't talking about that kind of challenge. There are two things: 1. Pieces that are more challenging to read/watch because the story is deeper and the challenging read is required to tell that story. 2. A piece that purposely makes it the story harder to follow, or is otherwise really difficult to fol…

The article makes the argument that the plot being hard to follow is in fact to the film's benefit. So unless you require "depth" to be plot depth, that doesn't match #2.

There are qualities other than "plot depth" that can be enhanced by ambiguity. Most people don't watch a film solely for the plot.

> It's a crime drama.

Is that prescriptive or descriptive?

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#159

Post by FireBeyond »

lqet wrote: post #49
telesphore wrote: post #46

It's a matter of setting up expectations and balancing that with good story telling. Ambiguity, elision, out-of-order story telling, etc. are all part of art but it's a delicate balance. There's a contract that artists set up with the audience that will allow them to use these techniques. Primer is one of those where I'm OK with my confusion because the story was interesting without all the answers, and it was setup…

> On the other hand, the fade-to-black ending of The Sopranos was, in my opinion, a total violation of that contract. Nowhere did they setup that kind of ambiguity. I respectfully disagree. One of the qualities of "The Sopranos" was exactly that things weren't always spelled out explicitely. Also, I did not really find the ending to be extremely ambigious. I mean, it is pretty clear what happened.

I mean even that exact ending was spelled out a few episodes before, when the characters are (and I'm paraphrasing) discussing death, and how you never know, because for you, things are just happening around you, you're living, then ... nothing.

Michael Imperioli even pointed it out on a late show interview, that there were multiple hints in the previous episodes that spelled things out entirely clearly.

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#160

Post by WalterBright »

lexapro wrote: post #149
WalterBright wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being smart isn't good enough. One must also be motivated, be willing to put in the effort, and not be discouraged by repeated failure. I had a friend once who was very smart. He was always starting new projects to make money, and always quit at the first or second obstacle.

>One must also be motivated, be willing to put in the effort, and not be discouraged by repeated failure. And even then they will most likely fail. So they need a lot of luck, too.

Ya know, getting a real estate license and then quitting, which is one of the things he did, is not bad luck. It's quitting.

Succeeding isn't merely lightning striking. There's a lot of perseverance and work involved. Just like nobody rides a bike successfully the first time they get on it. You have to keep getting on it until you learn.

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